Tentacle-Free Anime: "Death Note" [Live-Action](2017)

Heya, folks. I hope you've been doing well lately. So many exciting things have started up around here. I may be making even more personal content than I ever have before, and I got engaged to the love of my life. So now I'm helping plan a wedding. The feelings of happiness I've had over all this feel very alien to me. You could say I've been doing really good. However, there has been one black spot in all of that. And today... we're gonna talk about it.​​

Summary:A high school student discovers a supernatural notebook that has deadly powers. He can kill anyone he wishes simply by inscribing their name within its pages. Intoxicated with his new power, he begins to eliminate those he deems unworthy of life.[Official Synopsis]

[SPOILERS!!]

It's a funny thing really that this is the first time we're discussing Death Note on TFA. Seeing as how there is an entire anime series and three live-action Japanese films. Death Note is my favorite manga of all time and one of my favorite stories, period. I have a lot of really fond memories of it, growing up. And it did a lot to show me how one can tell a truly compelling serialized single narrative crime drama with an interesting supernatural bend.

The best poster

It's only fair then that I give Netflix's Death Note film a logical, purposeful review rather than one driven on raw emotion. Because I have a lot for this film and in other settings I have been quite vocal about it. However, having had to sit down and watch yet another Hollywood adaptation of a beloved Japanese property, I do think I should be allowed at least one genuinely emotional response before we get into this. So, in the words of Lord Vader himself: NOOOOOO!!!

In Hollywood there is some notion that properties from other countries need to have some sort of bend that make them feel tonally more “American.” It generally doesn't matter what the property is, if it doesn't fit some ill-conceived and totally incorrect notion of “Americanism” that people from the States won't be able to identify with then there's no way they're going to enjoy or, in most cases, even watch the film.

This, I'm truly convinced, is part of why Death Note for a Western remake was stripped of its intellectual narrative of a cat and mouse game between two of the world's smartest individuals and instead made to be a high school dramedy that devolves into a literal chase between two of the world's dumbest individuals. And make no mistake, in my book this is a dramedy. Go watch a clip of Light meeting Ryuk the death god for this first time and instead of a haunting first meeting or a meeting between two individuals unafraid of the other, you get one of the biggest laughs I have had at a movie in ages. Which is genuinely not what you – nor I – want from a story like this.Death Note is another terrible Western adaptation of anime. Why, though? Dragon Ball Z and Ghost in the Shell you can argue are too inherently Eastern in nature for one and way too introspective for the other to truly translate to modern Western sensibilities. I would tell you you're wrong, but here we are. If anything Death Note should have been the easiest thing anime has ever produced to adapt. All the core nature of the story requires is one highly intelligent high school student to find the titular notebook and one highly intelligent detective to try and track them down. The grand cat and mouse game of justice vs. evil can begin, and the setting literally doesn't matter. The genders don't matter, either.

Ryuk is the shinigami we deserve but not the one we need right now

Yet instead of two individuals seemingly controlling each situation they're in on some nebulous, psychological level and the chaos that ensues around them because one of them is killing a thousands of people and the other is trying their best to keep up, instead of a tale of two individuals who are seemingly forcing the audience to ask themselves: Would I be more like Kira or L? What is justice and what is evil? Am I good person or am I bad? Or are we all somewhere in the middle?What Netflix's Death Note film does instead is turn the character of Light into a man who quite literally makes every killing decision for self-preservation, revenge, or more often in this film because he shows another character, Mia, what power he has and she will literally sleep with him in order to get that power for herself. And every scene they're in together, if he says no to letting her do something, she just has to give him a little hope and he folds immediately. This is not in way, shape or form a resemblance of the character that made Death Note such a compelling read/watch when it was first coming out.The character of Light is one whom never second guesses himself and this Light does constantly. I don't understand if Netflix and Wingard assumed audiences wouldn't be able to relate to a character that likes killing people, but changing him so fundamentally takes away all tension and charisma that character has as our main lead. And the first twist at the end that Mia is the killing loving villain in the end that's been using Light to get what she wants is neither fascinating nor inspired because it's a cliché narrative that both boring and unrelenting in how dumb the entire storyline plays out.Stretching the use of the Death Note well past what it's actually capable of as well as ending Light and Mia's relationship – and one of their lives – in an action set piece that's more set piece than action. It's a hollow end to what could have been a compelling character, but whom is dragged down by the weight of how dumb everything and everyone around them is. All the action, by the way, in this film, is boring and the literal chase seen between L and Light is so unforgiving in how much tension it actually lacks I wonder, like so much of this film, how it even made into the script.Speaking of L, let's talk about him. Because this is a character that is essentially the co-lead of the original series that is Kira/Light's foil and the other reason this series was heralded as being as compelling as it was. L, you see, is the world's greatest detective. And he proves that time and again throughout the story. With Kira being the one case he could never truly crack even if he was correct in his suspicions of who Kira was.

Kira meet L. L you guessed correctly good job.

L also has some highly awkward quirks that make him interesting to be around. From how he sets in chairs to how he holds phones to the fact that he eats only sweets 100% of the time. But each one of these serve a purpose that he has carefully cultivated throughout his life. They give him energy and help boost his brain power. By attempting to put in as little effort as possible for a task as well as keeping his sugar levels high he's often able to keep the analytical side of his brain going on a much more regulated schedule than most people.

In Netflix's Death Note ever scene where he displays these quirks they happen in a manner that is both calling attention to them as well as serving only the purpose to show how weird this guy is. Isn't it weird how he does all these very inhuman-like things? He's so weird! And it serves no purpose. It's never fun to see, it doesn't elicit the response of “Oh, they kept that in here!” but instead, at least for me, only drove home how little the creatives behind this property actually understood it. Sadly, this is not the worst offense to L's core character either. L is a character with very little in the way of emotional attachments. He has to be in both his line of work and as a highly logical being.

There are only a few emotional attachments he has in the original series that are ultimately used to exploit him, but those moments are earned because of how long we get to last with this character and get to know him. Yet at no point does L ever do anything really stupid based on his emotional responses to those attachments being used against him. Until the end he is a logical creature.

In Netflix's Death Note halfway through the movie he goes from being someone who seems like he is guessing his way to finding out who Kira is to literally someone who makes every single decision based off of the emotion of fear after his attachments are used against him. Even getting reprimanded for it for at one point and being forced to go against the law to take it into his own hands, again, something that betrays the very core of the character that is L.

All of this culminates in a scene which leaves Light in a hospital bed being asked by his dad, who is a cop that up to this point wants to catch Kira, suddenly asking his son who he knows is Kira if he's a bad guy or a good guy, essentially? And L, who is in the possession of a single page from the Death Note tempted to write Light's name on said page. Ryuk the death god then tells Light that humans are very interesting and the film ends. With literally no resolution to the overall plot of the film, we're in the middle of some sort of action still trying to be decided by L, and a genuinely feeble attempt at forcing the audiences to ask those very introspective questions that I gave as examples earlier.

If there's one saving grace to Death Note it's that at the very least they got the character of Ryuk as close to being a faithful adaptation as this film ever sees. He's not quite the Ryuk from the original series, who's waaaay less involved with the choices the character's themselves make than this Ryuk is, but he's close enough. And he's always great to watch when he's on screen. Ryuk is haunting to look at and really like that he's always just out of focus. It's very other. That is the most inspired thing this film ever has going for it.

This is all to say that I did not like the Death Note film. Not only because of my own visceral responses to the uninspired changes made to the characters and the overall narrative, but because stripped down to its own thing, away from the original source material, this just isn't a good movie. The tones are all over the place, I don't think I'm wrong in calling this a dramedy. The song choices are incredibly absurd and never once fit the actual scene they're placed in. The narrative itself is lacking in that there almost isn't one. Boy finds notebook, boy is chased because of said notebook, and the movie never gives a proper resolution to the actual story introduced in said movie.​

Mia really could have been an intriguing third party villain.

The characters are simultaneously boring and stupid, making decisions that are more for plot purposes rather than making it a character driven narrative and even the love connection between Light and Mia feels hollow and unremarkable. Perhaps it was meant to given where they take Mia, but because so much of the film happens because Light literally wants to get laid, they could have done a better job at making us care for these two character so when the twist happens it’s more of a knife in the back for Light and viewer alike rather than being the eye rolling drama device it ended up being.

This movie is bad at being a movie, let alone being an adaptation. And for me that puts it alongside Dragon Ball Evolution and The Last Airbender as one of the worst offenders of storytelling in movie history. Ghost in the Shell literally made whitewashing the big twist in its own narrative and somehow the twists in this film ended up feeling worse. Netflix, your movie is bad and you should feel bad.

Final Score: 1 Shining Beacon of Death God Hope out of 5

Is Netflix' "Death Note" really that bad? Let us know in the comments!